Form-Meaning Connections in Second Language Acquisition

Bill VanPatten, Jessica Williams, Susanne Rott, Mark Overstreet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780805849134
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135614195
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Linguistics

Form-Meaning Connections in Second Language Acquisition is an interdisciplinary and timely edited book of essays and empirical studies, most of which are based on the papers presented at the Form and Meaning Conference held in Chicago in 2002. The goal of the conference and now of the book is to present linguistic and cognitive approaches to second language acquisition, attempting to integrate external and internal issues in interlanguage development, while outlining directions for future research. The editors address questions, such as: What is the nature and sequence of the form-meaning mapping process? How are these connections made? How are these connections used to construct grammars and lexicons? And, how can conditions and external factors be manipulated to improve the chances of making these form-meaning connections?

Contributors to this volume include such second language acquisition scholars as Susan Gass, Nick Ellis, Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig, Catherine Doughty, and Diane Larsen-Freeman. They address these form-meaning issues from a variety of settings and from multiple perspectives.

Researchers and graduate students in applied linguistics, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and language pedagogy will find this volume to be an important resource.

CHAPTER 1
Form-Meaning Connections in Second Language Acquisition

Bill VanPatten, Jessica Williams, and Susanne Rott
University of Illinois at Chicago

Form-meaning connections (FMCs) have long occupied the interest of second language acquisition (SLA) researchers. From the early research on acquisition orders to current day minimalist discussion of the interface between syntax and morphology, FMCs have been an integral component of SLA. Learners must grapple with verb inflections, nominal inflections, particles, determiners, and other FMCs as they work their way toward the creation of a linguistic system that bears resemblance to the L2. Just what is involved in the creation of FMCs? Are the processes different from those involving syntax, for example? To what extent does their creation involve multiple processes? What are the relative contributions of learner internal factors and aspects of the input itself?

This volume offers perspectives on FMCs from a variety of disciplines. This introductory chapter attempts to link these strands of research in a unified discussion by turning attention to questions of processing. Empirical and theoretical literature on FMCs has looked at a wide range of behavioral and cognitive subprocesses, beginning with the initial link between a lexical or grammatical form and its meaning(s) to the use of the form by the L2 learner. This introduction examines learner and input factors as they affect different stages of the processing of input. The discussion addresses the following specific aspects of language learning: the establishment, subsequent processing, and use of FMCs. Many questions posed here underlie the more practical issue of the effect of instruction: To what extent must attention be paid to L1–L2 contrasts in teaching? Do universal processing mechanisms overshadow any pedagogical efforts that might be made? Do different aspects of language require different pedagogical strategies? How can factors in the L2 environment be manipulated more effectively. A deeper understanding of how FMCs are made and maintained may help answer some of these questions. The discussion begins with some fundamental considerations, namely, the nature of FMCs themselves.

WHAT IS A FORM-MEANING CONNECTION?

What Is Form?

We take form to mean a surface feature of language or a surface manifestation of an underlying representation. Surface features can include the following:

• lexemes: eat (Eng.), com- (Span.), mang- (Fr.),

• verbal inflections: -ed (Eng.), -ó/-é (Span.), -it/-u (Fr.)

• nominal inflections: he/him (Eng.), él/le/lo (Span.), il/lui/le (Fr.)

• nominal derivational inflections: dis-advantage, thought-less

• adjectival inflections: abierto/abierta (Span.), overt/overte (Fr.)¹

• functors including complementizers, classifiers, determiners, and particles such as wa and ga in Japanese

To be sure, not all languages share the same surface features and not all languages make use of the features to the same degree. Agglutinative languages, such as Quechua, make much more use of inflections on nouns and verbs to convey meanings that Indo-European languages, for example, would convey by prepositions, adverbs, or some other free-standing lexical item or morpheme (Langacker, 1972; Spencer & Zwicky, 1998).

All of the forms listed correspond to target language features and categories. The chapters in this volume use the term form as suggested by the previous list; that is, form is viewed as lexicon, inflections, particles, and the like.² These are not the only units of language acquisition, however Formulaic expressions and routines larger than individual words (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Ellis, 1996; Krashen, 1981; Myles, Hooper & Mitchell, 1998; Myles, Mitchell & Hooper, 1999; Peters, 1985; Skehan, 1998; Weinert, 1995; Wong Fillmore, 1976) can be considered forms in the sense that learners can extract them from the input and assign them a meaning or function.

What Is Meaning?

Meaning is understood in a variety of ways. In the field of linguistics, lexical semantics has tended to dominate the field, with extensive research on the lexical-semantic-syntactic interface underscoring the importance of verbs in projecting sentential syntax. For example, the verb dry contains information related to its meaning: <agent, patient> and [[X ACT] CAUSE [Y BECOME DRY]]. This information reveals that both an agent and patient are involved in making the activity of dry to come about and that the activity involves a change of state that is caused by something (Levin & Hovav, 1998).

Looking at meaning as it applies to surface features of language, it can minimally refer to the following:

• concrete semantic referential meaning: in English, [kaet] means a four-legged feline

• displaced or abstract semantic referential meaning: -aba- in Spanish means nonpunctual so that when a speaker is narrating some past event, that person is indicating an event or state in progress

• sociolinguistic meaning: when vous is used instead of tu in French the speaker indicates something about politeness, deference, and/or social distance

• pragmatic meaning: when someone says “Why don’t you take a break?” the intent of this utterance is understood, that is, it is a suggestion and not a real Wh-question that demands a “because…” answer

In the present volume, it is clear that the various authors intend the real-world referential definition of meaning with semantic content. In this discussion, meaning is also restricted to this narrower sense. Thus, this volume is concerned with concrete, displaced, or abstract referential value such as number, temporal reference, agency, aspect, and lexical reference.

What Is a Form-Meaning Connection?

It may seem obvious that a form-meaning connection is a situation in which a form encodes some kind of referential meaning. However, the situation is a bit more complicated. Three distinct possibilities present themselves:

1. one form encodes one meaning

2. one form encodes multiple meanings

a. in different contexts

b. in a single context

3. multiple forms encode the same meaning

Forms with a one-to-one correspondence with meaning do exist, although this is not the only type of form-meaning relationship. In Japanese, ga means only one thing: “subject or agent” in a nonpassive sentence. In Turkish, lar means “more than one.” In Spanish -mos exclusively means first person plural. Forms that have multiple meanings are more complex. In Spanish, the pronoun se can refer to real-world reflexivity as in Juan se ve ‘John sees himself’, and it can refer to unspecified subjects as in Aquí se vive bien ‘One lives well here.’ It can also refer to datives (i.e., stand in for dative pronouns) when direct object pronouns follow in sequence as in Juan se lo dio a María ‘John gave it to Mary’. With lexical forms, homonyms are examples of one form having multiple meanings. The word [plen] (spelled either ‘plain’ or ‘plane’) can refer to at least the following: simple; not pretty; a flat expanse of terrain; a type of craft for air transportation; a tool used to shave off small amounts of wood; the act of shaving off small amounts of wood; the act of tires skimming on wet pavement. Thus, the same form may encode different meanings depending on context. It is also possible for a form that encodes multiple meanings at once. For example, the German article dem encodes many components of meaning: definiteness, dative case, singular, and either masculine or neuter gender. No part of the form can be uniquely linked to a specific component of meaning.

Finally, some forms share meaning. This is not unusual in the case of lexical items and bound morphemes. For example, pastness can be encoded by both a temporal lexical item (‘yesterday’, ‘before’) as well as bound and unbound morphemes (‘was’, ‘-ed’). Plurality can be encoded by quantifying modifiers (‘many’, ‘two’) as well as by bound and unbound morphemes (‘teeth’, ‘-s’). Different bound morphemes may map onto the same meaning: In Spanish, -aba- and -ía- both encode pastness and nonpunctual aspect. They only differ in that they must be used with particular classes of verbs whose distinction is not semantic. -aba- can only be used with verbs with a for a theme vowel (e.g., hablar), whereas -ía- can only be used with verbs with theme vowels e/i (e.g., decir, beber). Another example of forms sharing meaning are the derivational inflections dis-, non- and un- in English (e.g., dishonest, nonnative, uneven). These morphemes all mean “opposite of” or “not” and their distribution is based on nonsemantic features of their words they attach to (e.g., in general, non-attaches to nouns; dis- attaches to nouns, adjectives, and verbs; and un- attaches to adjectives). Bound morphemes can also overlap in meaning. As noted, in Spanish -aba encodes pastness, first/third person singular, and nonpunctual aspect; in contrast, -ió encodes the meanings of pastness, third person singular, and punctual aspect. Thus, these two verb inflections overlap in their encoding of pastness, but they do not encode exactly the same meanings.

The discussion has identified FMCs as connections between an L2 form and its L2 meaning. However, L2 forms can also be connected to meanings that are not L2-like. For example, Jarvis and Odlin (2002) reported that Swedish learners of English mapped L2 prepositions onto L1-based spatial concepts. Similarly, referential meaning can be connected to a form that is not L2-like (or only partially so). A learner of French may incorrectly assign ne to the meaning of negation, based on the distributional bias (Andersen, 1990) of this form in negative declaratives (e.g., Le chien ne mange pas ‘The dog is not eating’) in the L2. In fact, it serves a purely grammatical function in certain kinds of expressions (e.g., Je n’ai que deux class ‘I only have two classes’). Unanalyzed chunks, such as comment t’appelles, lookit, or dunno, are further examples of L2 derived interlanguage (IL) forms that learner...

Table of contents

• Second Language Acquisition Research Theoretical and Methodological Issues
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• CHAPTER 1 Form-Meaning Connections in Second Language Acquisition
• I Factors and Processes
• II Evidence and Impact
• III Research and the Classroom
• IV Commentary
• Author Index
• Subject Index